Günter Blobel was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell. Born May 21, 1936 in Waltersdorf/Silesia, Germany, he now lives in the New York, where he is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and faculty member at Rockefeller University.

Blobel's research has focused on the process by which newly made proteins are moved across the membranes of eukaryotic cell structures called organelles. Organelles are membrane bound regions within the cell. Accurate delivery of proteins to their target organelles is vital to proper cellular function. Malfunction in this delivery process can produce aberrant (abnormal) cells. The study of protein processing and transport has immediate bearing on diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's and AIDS.

In the average eukaryotic cell, there are thousands of different types of proteins, and about a...